As I've mentioned, I've never been the type to get hives over the remake announcements that seem to crop up in the trades every other day, or who feels that a bad redo can somehow denigrate its original. I understand that the idea of people associating The Wicker Man with Nicolas Cage karate kicking Leelee Sobieski into a wall instead of the 1973 Christopher Lee version can be a little painful, but overall what's the harm, so long as the film at least tries to bring something interesting to the table?
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The Disney Digital 3D™ification of The Lion King for its theatrical re-release, a limited run meant to herald the arrival of new Blu-ray and 3-D Blu-ray editions like a baboon waving a newborn lion cub around at the top of a cliff, has prompted at least one blogger to suggest that this is an instance of the company "trying to ruin" her childhood. And while childhoods are very fragile things in the Internet age, prone to explode with the merest hint of contact with George Lucas's latest doings or a Point Break remake or a Monopoly movie, I suspect in this case the outrage is as manufactured as the demand for these animated classics that are always being jerked back into the Disney Vault to be kept fresh for the next generation of susceptible children and their nostalgic parents. For most of the young audience members getting their first exposure to The Lion King, any theatrical experience, 3-D or not, is going to be dwarfed by repeated home viewings on TVs and smaller screens, again and again until the very cadences of the lines are etched permanently into their grey matter ("When he was a young warthog--" "When I was a young warthooooooooog!").
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Some actors are chameleons, shifting drastically from one color to another depending on the role. Ryan Gosling may not be one of them: There will always be a little Ryan Gosling, even just a mischievous glimmer, in any character the actor plays. But then, that's part of what makes a movie star a movie star: It's impossible to separate Cary Grant from his Cary Grantness, or to think of Bette Davis without seeing an enormous pair of eyes framed by mascara fringe.
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2011 is turning out to be a strong year for what can only be awkwardly summarized as films about aging hipster couples. That's dire, dismissive-sounding shorthand for what are actually plangent, pensive works about people facing the realization that time is making their carefree choices to forgo a more mainstream path into hard facts.
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The title phrase of I Don't Know How She Does It is lobbed repeatedly at intrepid working mom heroine Kate Reddy (Sarah Jessica Parker, who also provides a Sex and the City-style pontifical voiceover) throughout this alleged comedy, sometimes in celebration, sometimes out of envy or condescension. Inherent in it is a swirl of self-doubt and competition. To be a mother, director Douglas McGrath's film suggests, is to be in the constant grip of guilt and judgment, worried that you're not giving enough, convinced that others are doing things better or more correctly than you, soothed when they appear to be doing worse.
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It's not like Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star aspires to be Citizen Kane, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail or even Wedding Crashers. All it wants to be is a silly, raunchy comedy about the rise of an extremely unlikely adult-film actor. That it fails so spectacularly in this regard makes it almost something special -- not only is Bucky Larson incredibly unfunny, it's also squeamish in a manner that makes you wonder if either writers Adam Sandler (who produced the film via his Happy Madison company), Allen Covert and Nick Swardson (who plays Bucky) have somehow never actually seen porn, or if they subcontracted the script out to a group of 8-year-olds with only the vaguest idea of what it entails. The latter would explain how incidental sex is to what's theoretically a movie all about it, from an early scene in which we learn that our hero has never masturbated or even heard of the concept, to the porn career he establishes, in which he never actually comes into contact with his costars.
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There's a moment at the end of Gavin O'Connor's MMA drama Warrior in which two men who have been relentlessly beaten and pummeled in the octagon stand dripping with exhaustion, rivers of sweat mingling with the tears running down their faces. It doesn't matter that you can't tell the sweat from the tears; that's partly the point of Warrior anyway, which makes you feel every emotional wound just as acutely, if not more so, than the bruising, rib-crunching body blows. Yes, this is a mixed martial arts movie (distributed by genre specialists Lionsgate, no less). But it's also one of the most heart-wrenching and deeply felt films of the year.
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[Minor early spoilers may follow, particularly for anyone who's avoided Contagion's trailer or coverage from Venice. -- Ed.]
No one is safe in Contagion -- not from the MEV-1 virus that ricochets out of a crowded Macau casino to cut down a sizable selection of the global population with frightening plausibility, and not from Steven Soderbergh's pitiless refusal to abide by the unspoken rules of the mainstream movie.
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At first glance, the formidable cast of Main Street appears to have gathered for a chance to work off the final original script from Horton Foote, the Pulitzered playwright and two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter (for 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird and 1983's Tender Mercies) who passed away in 2009. But as the film creeps along with few signs of life, one begins to suspect the real reason they're all there is to show off that most treasured item in any actor's toolkit -- the Southern accent. Main Street is an ensemble drama that functions as a display case for a range of regional drawls, from the authentic to absurd. Patricia Clarkson, playing Willa, a divorcee who's returned to her hometown of Durham, North Carolina, easily walks away with best in show, but coming from Louisiana she's in slightly more familiar territory than Colin Firth, who, as Gus Leroy, a representative of a toxic waste management company, is a sorely unconvincing Texan.
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When they work, found footage films are testaments to the power of a limited perspective. Features like The Blair Witch Project, REC and Cloverfield get juice out of the fact that we're not able to see or know more than the characters on screen. They use a gloss of the intentionally clumsy -- jittery camerawork, lower quality footage, mundane dialogue -- to allow a story to invade from an unexpected angle. They require cleverness in concept and, more importantly, in construction, particularly when the found footage flick in question is of the horror genre, as so many of them are; there's no easier way to lose your audience than to make them wonder why, when such frightening things are allegedly happening, your characters are still bothering to roll tape. On the plus side, they're a way to hide your monster (or witch, or demon, or alien) from view for longer than is usually allowed a more standard film -- and the monster we imagine is usually much scarier than the one we finally see on screen.
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To answer the question that occurred to many when the golden-hued trailer for Shark Night 3D was first unveiled -- yes, the sun does eventually set on the film's hapless group of Louisiana college students, leaving them to battle their way through a long, dark shark night of the soul. Everything else about stuntman-turned-director David R. Ellis's latest effort is similarly as advertised -- an ambitiously differentiated array of shark species show up to chomp on the tanned, low-BMI bodies of the cast and, every once in a while, on the camera, darting at the screen with toothy maws open as if to gulp the 3-D glasses off the faces of the audience.
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An executive and an underling are working late in a plushly appointed living room at the start of Love Crime, a twisty French drama about office competition and revenge that's the final film from director Alain Corneau, who passed away last year. The exec treats the other employee in a way that would send any real-world worker running off to gather evidence for a sexual harassment lawsuit -- invading the young woman's personal space, telling her how pretty she looks when she smiles, leaning into her throat to smell traces of her perfume.
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When I saw Hong Kong producer-director Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame at the Venice Film Festival last year, I lamented that although American viewers would probably be able to track the movie down on DVD or online, the picture wasn't likely to get a U.S. theatrical release. Happily, I was wrong, and if you're lucky enough to live in one of the cities where Detective Dee is playing, you too will now have a chance to witness Tsui's glorious and somewhat unhinged vision as he tackles an episode in the real-life history of China -- the ascent of the first female emperor to the throne -- adding fanciful touches like spontaneous human combustion and mysterious creepy-crawlies with dangerous powers. It's the kind of ambitious, loopy spectacle that begs to be seen on the big screen if at all possible.
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The bold, relatively brief life of Serge Gainsbourg, the French singer, songwriter and svengali who died in 1991, is twice removed from the story told by Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. First-time writer and director Joann Sfar has said that polishing the fine points of that life -- ceding to biographical "truth" -- was of no interest to him. A top-flight fan and best-selling comic book artist, Sfar was intent on avoiding the brash outlines of a biopic in favor of a certain sort of homage, the tender evocation of style and personality in place of strict chronology and narrative arc. A parallel determination to inhabit his hero's life with an intensely personal, interpretive gusto bends the film back into a more conventional shape; the big moments play out with the giddy gratification of fan fiction. Both abstract and very specific, Sfar's inspirations abound such that they frequently overshadow those of his subject.
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No one comes out looking good in The Debt, a grim thriller from director John Madden: Not the Nazi purveyor of concentration camp atrocities, which is a given, but not the trio of young, dedicated Mossad agents sent to bring him to justice after the war either. The film's a remake of a 2007 Israeli effort that never made it to US theaters, but that presumably carried with it a sense of self-critique, of taking on national mythologizing. Forgoing that focus, The Debt comes across as critical of human nature in general, as a tale of self-interest winning out over the greater good. It's a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when the character who first offers up this assessment is the aforementioned Nazi monster.
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